‘I will.’ I unscrewed a bottle of ink on Charles’s desk and used the lid as an ashtray. I could feel the whisky warming my stomach, encouraging me to continue. ‘Alan drove back to Framlingham on either Friday evening or Saturday morning. You must have known that he’d broken up with James and you guessed that he would be alone in the house. You drove up on Sunday morning but when you arrived you saw that there was someone with him, up on the roof. That was John White, his neighbour. You parked your car behind a bush where it wouldn’t be seen – I noticed the tyre tracks when I was there – and watched what happened. The two men had an altercation, which turned into a scuffle, and you took a photograph of the two of them, just in case it might be useful. And it was, wasn’t it, Charles? When I told you that I believed Alan had been murdered, you sent it to me, to put me on the wrong track.
‘But it wasn’t White who killed him. He left and you watched him take the shortcut back to his house, through the trees. That was when you made your move. You went into the house. Presumably Alan thought you had come to continue the conversation that had begun at the Ivy Club. He invited you to join him for breakfast on the tower. Or maybe you talked your way up there. How you got up there doesn’t really matter. The point is that when you got the opportunity, when his back was to you, you pushed him off.
‘That was only part of it. After you’d killed him, you went into Alan’s study – because you’d read Magpie Murders and you knew exactly what you were looking for. It was a gift! A suicide letter, written in Alan’s own hand! We both know Alan always wrote the first draft by hand. You had the letter that Alan had hand-delivered on Friday morning. But there was a second letter in the book and you realised you could use it. I really have to kick myself because I’ve been an editor for more than twenty years and this must be the only crime ever committed that an editor was born to solve. I knew there was something strange about Alan’s suicide letter, but I didn’t see what it was. I know now. Alan wrote pages one and two on the Friday morning. But page three, the actual page that signals his intention to kill himself, has been taken from the book. It’s no longer Alan’s voice. There’s no slang, no swearing. It’s formal, slightly stilted, as if it’s been written by someone for whom English is a second language. “… for me there can be no possibility of a reprieve.” “It is my hope that you will be able to complete the work of my book.” It’s not a letter from Alan to you. It’s a letter from Pünd to James Fraser – and the book he refers to is not Magpie Murders, it’s The Landscape of Criminal Investigation.
‘You were incredibly lucky. I don’t know exactly what Alan wrote to you but the new page – what eventually became page three – fitted in perfectly. You had to cut a little bit off the top, though. There’s one line missing – the line that reads “Dear James”. I could have worked that out if I’d measured the pages, but I’m afraid that was something I missed. And there was something else. To complete the illusion that all four pages belonged to the same, single letter, you added numbers in the right top corner but if I’d looked more closely, I’d have seen that the numbers are darker than the letters. You used a different pen. Otherwise, it was perfect. For Alan’s death to appear like suicide you needed a suicide letter and now you had one.
‘It still had to be delivered. The letter that Alan had actually sent you, the one apologising about the dinner which you had received the day before, had been hand-delivered. You needed it to appear as if it had been posted from Ipswich. The answer was simple. You found an old envelope – I suppose it was one that Alan had sent you at some other time – and put your manufactured suicide note in there. You assumed that no one would look too closely at the envelope. It was the letter that mattered. But as it happens I did notice two things. The envelope was torn. I assume you’d deliberately ripped through the postmark to obliterate the date. But there was something much more striking. The letter was handwritten but the envelope was typed. It exactly reflected something that had happened in Magpie Murders and of course it stuck in my mind.
‘So let’s get to the heart of the matter. You’d used part of a letter written by Atticus Pünd and unfortunately, if your plan was going to work, nobody could read it. If anyone put two and two together, the entire suicide theory would collapse. So that was why the chapters had to disappear. I have to say, I was puzzled why you were so unenthusiastic when I suggested travelling up to Framlingham to find them but now I know why you didn’t want them to be found. You removed the handwritten pages. You took Alan’s notebooks. You cleared the hard drive on his computer. It would mean losing the ninth book in the series – or postponing it until we could get someone else to finish it – but for you it was a price well worth paying.’
Charles sighed a little and set down his glass, which was empty again. There was a strange, relaxed atmosphere in the room. The two of us could have been discussing the proof of a novel as we had done so many times in the past. For some reason, I was sorry that Bella wasn’t here. I don’t know why. Perhaps it would have made everything that was unfolding feel a little more normal.
‘I had a feeling that you’d see through it all, Susan,’ he said. ‘You’re very clever. I’ve always known that. However, the motive! You still haven’t told me why I killed Alan.’
‘It was because he was going to pull the plug on Atticus Pünd. Isn’t that right? It all goes back to that dinner at the Ivy Club. That was when he told you. He had a radio interview with Simon Mayo the following week and it would give him the perfect opportunity to do it, the one thing that would give him a good laugh before he died, something that mattered even more than seeing the final book in print. You lied to me when you said he wanted to cancel the interview. It was still in his diary and the radio station didn’t know he was going to drop out. I think he wanted to go ahead. I think he was desperate.’
‘He was sick,’ Charles said.
‘In more ways than one,’ I agreed. ‘What I find extraordinary is that he had been planning this all along, from the very day that he invented Atticus Pünd. What sort of writer builds a self-destruct mechanism into his own work and watches it tick away for eleven long years? But that’s what Alan did. It was the reason why the last book had to be called Magpie Murders and nothing else. He had built an acronym into the nine titles. The first letters spelled out two words.’
‘An anagram.’
‘You knew?’
‘Alan told me.’
‘An anagram. But an anagram of what? In the end, it didn’t take me too long to work it out. It wasn’t the titles. They’re perfectly innocent. It wasn’t the characters. They were named after birds. It wasn’t the policemen. They were nicked out of Agatha Christie or based on people he knew. James Fraser was named after an actor. That just leaves one character.’
‘Atticus Pünd.’
‘It’s an anagram of “a stupid …”’